tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post115930248176593260..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: We Must Speak What We FeelCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1159645701172913292006-09-30T15:48:00.000-04:002006-09-30T15:48:00.000-04:00Dear Eileen, I'm glad you like it! I have not read...Dear Eileen, <BR/><BR/>I'm glad you like it! I have not read the books - but his utopian plans have had some coverage in the press here (and I bet they make a TC doc of it). The independent community project does seem a bit of the 'same old, same old' and the skills desired hardly speak of brave new worlds.<BR/><BR/>I am sorry you cannot butcher a pig - I had half imagined that you would end up spending your holidays there next year.<BR/><BR/>I guess we will just have to read the (inevitable?) blog instead.N50https://www.blogger.com/profile/02927387227571782287noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1159583637376305032006-09-29T22:33:00.000-04:002006-09-29T22:33:00.000-04:00I can't play a musical instrument, or sew, or butc...<I>I can't play a musical instrument, or sew, or butcher a pig [nor would I want to].</I><BR/><BR/>If you want to learn, <A HREF="http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-157061377x-0" REL="nofollow">here's</A> the book for you. I keep it in my bathroom in part as anticipation of what I might need to know, depending on where I end up next year.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1159569740351388112006-09-29T18:42:00.000-04:002006-09-29T18:42:00.000-04:00Eileen likes her present very much and is now tryi...Eileen likes her present very much and is now trying to figure out if Dylan Evans is fascinating in a good way or a bad way [haha]. His books look great, especially "Emotion: A Short Introduction," which I have ordered. His "Utopia" experiment is altogether another story--I fear that, like the "Shire" in Bend, Oregon, it's a somewhat misguided attempt to "go back" to something that never really existed. But perhaps I'm just bitter. As it turns out, I do not possess any of the special "talents" is is seeking for his utopian community. It's true; I can't play a musical instrument, or sew, or butcher a pig [nor would I want to]. Damn.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1159533777628491742006-09-29T08:42:00.000-04:002006-09-29T08:42:00.000-04:00A present for EJSymptomatic of a common desire to ...<A HREF="http://www.dylan.org.uk/index.html" REL="nofollow">A present for EJ</A><BR/><BR/><BR/>Symptomatic of a common desire to find emotional solace in a perfect past?<BR/><BR/>As is <A HREF="http://www.bendshire.com" REL="nofollow">this</A>N50https://www.blogger.com/profile/02927387227571782287noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1159526161036321422006-09-29T06:36:00.000-04:002006-09-29T06:36:00.000-04:00I'm with you in feeling sympathy for Edmund: how c...I'm with you in feeling sympathy for Edmund: how can we watch the play and not feel his exclusion, and collude with him in his revenge? When I called him an "artist of catastrophe" I meant to convey that there is something exuberantly creative in the forces he unleashes, and something beautiful as well ... just like the storm that thunders out from Lear's tortured interior and sweeps the play along with it. But an artist as in love with chaos as Edmund is can't heal a world, can't change a world ... and may very ell enjoy decimating that world utterly.<BR/><BR/>I like your reading of him as part of Edgar, who yearns for stability ... that seems right to me.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1159492770335086362006-09-28T21:19:00.000-04:002006-09-28T21:19:00.000-04:00Just a quick thought, Jeffrey [see, I want to reve...Just a quick thought, Jeffrey [see, I want to revert to "Jeffrey"--a lovely name, by the way] regarding your description of Edmund as an "agent of catastrophe"--yes, of course he is just that. But in a sense, so is Lear [but for different reasons]. But Edmund is also someone who, due to the social and identity constraints of the time period [not only the period in which the play was written but also the early, more "primeval" period in which the action is supposedly set], is not *allowed* to act differently than he does. He must either silently suffer his role as Gloucester's "bastard" or take what he wants by subterfuge and force. He is, in a sense, the "queer" of the play. How would someone like Edmund, anyway, be more of an "agent" of that "widened world" you refer to? In the world of the play, he has no agency at all and I think it's especially telling that Shakespeare opens the play with the scene where Gloucester essentially debases his relationship to Edmund and acts as if Edmund isn't even standing right there while he's doing it. It's as if Shakespeare is signalling to us--in case we don't "get it"--this play is about Edmund. Even more so, about Edmund and Edgar.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1159471317644546702006-09-28T15:21:00.000-04:002006-09-28T15:21:00.000-04:00Once again, Emile B., I thank you for your immense...Once again, Emile B., I thank you for your immensely helpful bibliographic input.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1159460221134827752006-09-28T12:17:00.000-04:002006-09-28T12:17:00.000-04:00So academic. I know you are one, but dayum.I owe ...So academic. I know you are one, but <I>dayum</I>.<BR/><BR/>I owe you a couple more titles (check your email), but, meanwhile, I recommend taking a chaw on these:<BR/><BR/>Ahmed, Sara. (2004). <I>The cultural politics of emotion</I>.<BR/><BR/>May, Rollo. (1996, revised). <I>The meaning of anxiety</I>.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1159458652805553582006-09-28T11:50:00.000-04:002006-09-28T11:50:00.000-04:00Thank you, N50, for your very kind affirmation of ...Thank you, N50, for your very kind affirmation of what I am attempting with my project [and also of the random musings collectively posted on this blog]. There are many different ways, as you point out, for those working in different disciplines to collaborate productively, but even more importantly, to truly *engage* one another.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1159428744585067042006-09-28T03:32:00.000-04:002006-09-28T03:32:00.000-04:00To put it simply. It seems to me that literature a...To put it simply. It seems to me that literature and literary criticism at its best deals in emotion. EJ’s interest in identity, enchantment and (dis)embodiedness are all concerned with how people feel, with subjectivity, with empathy, with faith. You all write about those issues very eloquently here. It is what In The Middle majors in – and EJ your website positively throbs with emotion. So it makes sense to reach out to people in other disciplines, whether they be humanists or scientists (and by the way this distinction is read differently in Europe), who also deal in emotions and they <I>should</I> engage. <BR/><BR/>However there will be a very large number of projects which are not so directly concerned with emotions – and even when interested in similar issues will approach them from less emotionally-bound directions – and there, presumably, there will be less resonance. (Other?) medievalists will have to find other ways of dealing with those different approaches (and come to think of it the example I gave yesterday of environmental economists working with medievalists to study medieval farming techniques for their lessons in sustainability is just a very small example of that).N50https://www.blogger.com/profile/02927387227571782287noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1159383037278929672006-09-27T14:50:00.000-04:002006-09-27T14:50:00.000-04:00Now gods stand up for bastards! It's true, Edmund ...Now gods stand up for bastards! It's true, Edmund does have an affirmative power to him ... but his tragedy is that he is an artist of catastrophe, not the agent of a widened world.<BR/><BR/>I disagree with neither Eileen nor Karl: there is something reactionary in the hardening of identities that we see in the here and now. A medieval parallel? Bede, who lived during an epoch of hybridity and flux but wrote as if the world came predivided and immutable.<BR/><BR/><EM>I feel in my (ever changing) bones that the embodied approach to the person, one rooted in its ceaselessly changing but materially constrained immanence, is the right one.</EM><BR/>I like that a lot. The "ceaselessly changing" part is not always easy to bear, because part of that change is physical evidence of ceaseless movement towards demise (this morning Kid #1 catalogued the signs of aging he could read on his father's body -- ouch!). But that ceaseless change is also, for those of us who are not artists of catastrophe and see in bodies that wll endure into the future something of themselves, a difficult but not unfair price for inhabiting selves and worlds.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1159381523506466232006-09-27T14:25:00.000-04:002006-09-27T14:25:00.000-04:00And I would respond here to Karl's comments that t...And I would respond here to Karl's comments that they resonate well with the thinking of Zygmunt Bauman who, in his book "Postmodern Ethics," has written that, in times such as ours where everything seems so in flux, certain groups of people cling to their "tribalisms" and fundamentalisms all the more fiercely. I will quote here briefly from my and Mary Ramsey's Introduction to "The Postmodern Beowulf":<BR/><BR/>-----beginning of excerpt-----<BR/><BR/>In political life, under the lengthening shadows of the supposed eclipse of the nation-state, we have also witnessed the backlash, often with deadly results, of the fortress-like “isms” of the past: tribalism, territorialism, nationalism, parochialism, and fundamentalism, although it might be argued, as Bauman does, that these “isms” are always “brittle” and “endemically precarious,” subject as they are to a world in which the globalization of the economy, the “privatization of self-formation,” and the fragmentation of political sovereignties makes it increasingly difficult for any kind of collective identity-building to secure anything but temporary strongholds. At the same time, precisely because all “grand certitudes” have dissipated, they have also “split in the process into a multitude of little certainties, clung to all the more ferociously for their puniness.” With liquid modernity’s cutting loose of the “heavy” structures of the past, then, there are also the pockets (and sometimes, huge waves) of tenacious resistance, as well as, one would assume, a lot of personal and cultural and political anxieties over the tenuousness of everything.<BR/><BR/>-----end of excerpt-----<BR/><BR/>I, too, like Karl, feel that "the embodied approach to the person, one rooted in its ceaselessly changing but materially constrained immanence, is the right one." I also believe that it will be "across bodies" and not "across nations" or "across cultures" or "across identities" that a viable human rights philosophy will have to be rewritten [and may, therefore, include "other" animals].<BR/><BR/>As to [once again] those lines from Edgar, it's not just that they point to the importance of expressing what I am calling "rational emotion," but that they also point to the importance of how, in times of great personal, social, and more broadly political crisis, that the expression of "the human," rooted somewhat tragically in individual bodies, always matters. For that [and other] reasons, I've always felt that the true tragic hero of "Lear" is Edmund.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1159376060921205622006-09-27T12:54:00.000-04:002006-09-27T12:54:00.000-04:00I'm always saying this, but: a quick comment as I ...I'm always saying this, but: a quick comment as I run away from the table for only a time, I hope.<BR/><BR/>First, I hear Edgar in the same way as EJ, perhaps. Isn't there a kind of love necessary to memorialize grief?<BR/><BR/>Second, a reaction to JJC's <I>We live in a time of hardened identities, not loose and multiple ones</I>:<BR/><BR/>As much as I'm dubious of the crisis model (despite fully expecting a biological, environmental, or nuclear eschaton to kill me someday), isn't what you notice, JJC, in part a reaction to the loosening of old narratives and old justifications for identities? Don't we live in a time of reaction, all the more reactionary because there's no long any legitimate justification for marking off certain identities (species, race, gender, nation, etc. etc.) as fixed in their superiority or separateness? We've always lived in fantasy, but knowing that, as anyone must these days, makes some people all the more desparate to claim a reality for what they are.<BR/><BR/>There is a reality, nevertheless. It's bodies, which are also consciousnesses. By rerooting ourselves in bodies, we do root ourselves, paradoxically, in flux. This doesn't mean the disappearance of the person, not entirely. I feel in my (ever changing) bones that the embodied approach to the person, one rooted in its ceaselessly changing but materially constrained immanence, is the right one.<BR/><BR/>More to come later?Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1159372296258253972006-09-27T11:51:00.000-04:002006-09-27T11:51:00.000-04:00"An intriguing, difficult project," JJC wrote, and..."An intriguing, difficult project," JJC wrote, and I would re-emphasize the "difficult" part [haha]. This project, in fact, is, in some ways, so unformed and "initial" that a part of me wonders if I am stumbling down what will turn out to be a blind, difficult alley, but . . . I hope not.<BR/><BR/>As to my conception of a "new humanism," let's just say--for the time being--that I am still conceptualizing it, but that it will have something to do with affective and embodied thinking, as well as with the importance of humanistic scholarship to understanding what it means to "be human." And that means that, yes, I am not willing [yet] to give up on the idea of "being human" [and therefore, also, on the idea of a "humanism" that would attend to this state of being from a philosophical & socio-critical & aesthetic perspective] and its possible importance to living a "good life" [in the sense Aristotle gave to that phrase]. As to JJC's idea that we may not, in fact, live in posthuman age at all, I somewhat agree, but would ask if whether or not what we are living in is actually a kind of hybrid period in which more solid and more fluid identities exist alongside each other [and even overlap]. Regardless of all the postmodern theorizing within, say, literary studies, but also within cognitive science, over the supposed multiplicity of self, most people live their actual lives with very conscious recourse to a variety of essentialisms of self [I am a woman, I am a dyke, I am white, I am Irish, I am a liberal, etc.]. On a political level, the idea of a certain fludity of self and identities is an important safeguard against certain rigid fundamentalisms, but whether or not people can actually live in a state of continual identity flux is another question [although, come on, don't we all, to a certaine extent?]. But yes, JJC, we *do* live in that time of "hardened identities" you mention, and I think that may be a problem, actually, one that can hopefully be overcome [or "worked through"], I hope, through what I might call, for now, the new technologies of compassion and affective orientation.<BR/><BR/>As to whether or not the "hard" scientists will pull up a chair to the discussion I want to have, I think some won't [like Brockman], but others [like Nicholas Humphrey, Antonio Damasio, Oliver Sacks, Steven Pinker, E.O. Wilson, etc.] will pull up that chair, because they have already acknowledged in much of their own work the important insights to be gleaned from art, literature, history, and philosophy. In fact, for the past several years E.O. Wilson has engaged in an important higher ed. initiative with the naturalist, poet, and fiction writer Barry Lopez, relative to designing a special undergraduate curriculum that "weds," so to speak, scientific field research with artistic portfolio work. This curriculum has been instituted already at several institutions, including at Texas Tech., where the program results in a five-year B.A. in Natural History & the Humanities. So, yes, I think the "hard" scientists will come to the table if we invite the ones whose work is already empathetically inclined toward humanistic research, but there are still a lot of bridges to be built and I think a lot more work can [and should] be done by those of us on the humanities side to build those bridges to the more "hard" sciences and to ask the right questions of the scientists, and to really *engage* with them in dialogue, not just "poach" some of their ideas [as we are often wont to do] and run off with them to only apply them to a purely literary analysis. As to why, ultimately, anyone outside of literary studies should be interested in how a medieval studies scholar directs her research and thought and writing to pressing contemporary questions, that is the most urgent question of all that JJC poses here, and I can't provide a sufficient answer [yet], except to say that if we can somehow figure out new ways to do collaborative research with those working in other disciplines and to also make cogent arguments about the relevance of humanistic studies, especially of the past, to the so-called "real present," then I think it's possible, or I simply *want* it to be possible. Jane Bennett's book, incidentally, although labeled as "ethico-political theory" reads an awful lot like a lot of books I have read in literary studies, but the major difference is that her *concern* in the book is ethical action in the present world; nevertheless, her book addresses and anlyzes subjects as diverse as Paraclesus, Kant, Deleuze, Thoreau, Rene Magritte, and Gap khaki ads. One could say that here we have an example of a political theorist "doing" literary-aesthetic-historical studies, but where is the literary historian who is also a political theorist?<BR/><BR/>As to why I chose the lines spoken by Edgar in Shakespeare's "King Lear" as the title for my project, I don't necessarily see those lines as looking forward to an apocalypse [although I guess they *could* be that], so much as I see them as a lament for missed opportunities for the expression of feelings--specifically, love--and that is why I chose to reference that passage, because I want to somehow point to the importance of highlighting what Damasio would call "rational emotions," and which are often suppressed or overlooked or disregarded in our work. I am also giving myself a lever with which I hope to explore the possible connections between love and the health of the polis.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1159359170484015012006-09-27T08:12:00.000-04:002006-09-27T08:12:00.000-04:00An intriguing, difficult project. I know that, thr...An intriguing, difficult project. I know that, through this forum and through work you've shared with me, I've already read several fragments that are moving towards its whole.<BR/><BR/>I'm still having trouble articulating to myself with enough precision your conception of a “new humanism.” Part of it is that I'm not really sure if we live in a posthuman age after all: it seems like the dominant cultural reaction to a decentered notion of the self (whethere via science or philosophy) has been to ignore it. We live in a time of hardened identities, not loose and multiple ones (except for certain privileged subjects), no? But I realize also that your project is addressed to a scholarly community that is going to be more flexible in its conceptualziation of subjectivity. And perhaps more accepting of theorizing the role narrative plays in the organzing of selfhood and ethical relations.<BR/><BR/>It's easy for me to see why your bringing of cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, et al. will be of value when you bring it to the table where we premodernists gather to speak to each other. It's a bit tougher to imagine that, at this same table, the "hard" scientists are going to pull up a chair. What is in it for them, especially if (like Brockman) they feel they already possess methodologies sufficient to coming up with the answers? You say you aim to "demonstrate the relevance of premodern studies to pressing contemporary issues and questions." I don't doubt it; actually, I'm certain that you are already deeply engaged in this endeavor. But I'd really like to see a succinct statement of why those outside the field will need to pay attention to your work more than they do to, say, Jane Bennett's.<BR/><BR/>Could you say a little more about your choice of title? Edgar's lament is an acknowledgement of coming apocalypse, and has always struck me as wrenching, bleak, bare. I'm sure you mean to be more hopeful ... how does the compunction to speak what we feel initiate a new humanism?Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1159341576713122622006-09-27T03:19:00.000-04:002006-09-27T03:19:00.000-04:00Sounds facinating. I was irritated at a recent gat...Sounds facinating. <BR/><BR/>I was irritated at a recent gathering at the old skirmishes still being played out over relationships between traditional and tiny subsections of bigger fields of humanistic knowledge. It seemed (with only one exception - a brilliant paper on the nature of time) very tired indeed, hide-bound in bureaucracy and so entirely to miss the bigger picture of fundamental changes in the ways in which knowledge and understanding are being created and reproduced.<BR/><BR/>You are lucky to be able to apply for funding to START a project. Good luck!N50https://www.blogger.com/profile/02927387227571782287noreply@blogger.com